Many sales organizations use computing systems to assist their sales-related activities in various ways, such as to manage schedules of salespeople and to track sales-related information. For example, some such sales organizations (whether independent entities or the sales-related capability of a larger organization) may track information about known contacts (e.g., individuals and/or groups with which the sales organization has a pre-established relationship, such as based on prior sales or other interactions with that contact), about defined accounts (e.g., individuals and/or groups with which the sales organization has established billing/payment mechanisms, such as based on prior sales), about specific sales opportunities (e.g., identifications of specific quantities and/or revenue corresponding to specific items that a specific contact/account is considering purchasing, such as by a specific close date and with a specific likelihood of purchase and/or specific degree of interest), and about sales prospects that might lead to sales opportunities (e.g., a name of a person that might have some interest in one or more items available via the sales organization). In addition, some sales organizations may use computer-telephony-integration (“CTI”) capabilities to facilitate interacting with customers and/or potential customers via phone.
Some sales organizations are referred to as single-tiered organizations, in that a single sales-related individual (e.g., one of a group of individuals that all perform the same types of tasks) performs all activities related to interacting with a group of sales prospects in order to identify specific sales opportunities and to produce actual sales from those sales opportunities. Conversely, other sales organizations are referred to as being two-tiered organizations, in that a first group of sales development individuals (e.g., telemarketers) perform some initial activities related to sales prospects, such as to gather basic contact information and/or to assess some information about the potential sales interests of the prospects, while other salespeople later attempt to produce actual sales from at least some of those prospects.
However, various problems arise in such two-tiered organizations. For example, the first-tier sales development individuals may not perform sufficient processing related to prospects to enable the second-tier salespeople to efficiently perform their tasks, such as by not gathering sufficient information related to the prospects and/or by forwarding prospects to salespeople that do not have a sufficiently high likelihood of resulting in a specific sales opportunity. In addition, even if the first-tier sales development individuals are given specific instructions as to the tasks that they are to perform, such instructions may not be followed by all sales development individuals or in all situations, such as when the sales development individuals receive incentives (e.g., a financial incentive for each prospect forwarded to a salesperson and/or a requirement to forward a minimum number of prospects to salespeople) that lead them to not adequately follow the instructions. Moreover, it can often be difficult to remedy such problems, as the second-tier salespeople may not know which first-tier sales development individuals are causing problems with specific prospects, or it may instead be difficult or impossible for a second-tier salespeople to provide appropriate feedback in a meaningful way, such as to minimize or eliminate future occurrences of similar problems.
Accordingly, it would be beneficial to provide automated processing that manages sales-related activities so as to enforce defined types of processing and to allow problems that occur to be easily remedied, such as for multi-tiered sales organizations. In addition, it would be beneficial to provide such automated sales-related processing in a manner that benefits multiple unrelated sales organizations, such as by hosting a network-accessible service that provides such automated processing to multiple sales organizations that are clients of the service.